What We've Been Reading

Summer, the season for reading outside, is in full swing! Whether it be on a lovely holiday or even in your local park under a tree, we hope you've been picking up some interesting titles to 

All of us at Willoughby are also making the most of the long, bright days and have been diving in to fantastic reads! Here's what we've been fully engrossed in this past month.

She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai 

A very heart-warming read for anyone who needs something light after an intense or heavy book!  It's a book of short stories which follow the street cats of Tokyo, as they live alongside humans and one other. 

It’s a really sweet book and the further you read, you begin to realise the characters are connected in one way or another, both people and cats! With the cats as the protagonists of the book, you get to hear their thoughts, feelings and the way they find their way around the city and other cats' territories. It’s a lovely short read, best read somewhere cosy with a sleeping cat near you!

- Alisha

I Who Have Never Known Men by Justine Harpman

I'm reluctant to tell you very much about this strange post-apocalyptic novel, because I don't want to put you off, and it is very dark.

In an unspecified location and time, after an uncertain cataclysmic event, thirty nine women are kept locked in a cage underground. Each meal is delivered in a cart, their waking and sleeping times are dictated by fearsome, silent guards. The fortieth of their number, a young girl who was the youngest amongst them at the time of their capture watches and waits. 

As she was so young at the time of the catastrophe she lacks the understanding of what the other women have lost, so we see and understand this strange world through her eyes, and it is through her vigilance that the women are able to survive and forge a life.

This is a bleak read, but also very beautiful. Questions are left unanswered throughout, but this just has the effect of further immersing you in the world of the narrator. 

Give this a try, it will haunt you long after you finish reading.

'I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.'

- Marianne

All Fours by Miranda July

I had been looking forward to reading this since hearing about it earlier this year, I have enjoyed Miranda July's books in the past and this one looks as though it might get that elusive 'word of mouth favourite' status.

The narrator, an artist, decides to drive cross country from LA to New York, but half an hour after leaving home she locks eyes with  a man in a garage, exits the freeway and books herself into a motel, thereby beginning a very different journey.

This novel covers big themes: marriage and partnership, traumatic birth, menopause and ageing, and how to live fully and wholeheartedly. It is so eccentric and extremely funny, at the same time as tackling big questions about what it means to live as a woman. I did find myself attempting to dissect how much of the story is Miranda July herself, but it doesn't matter in the least. I loved the glimpse into arty west coast life, and the possibilities that a life with financial means can offer, but there's plenty in this that will resonate with anyone in the middle years of their life.

- Marianne

Red Doc by Anne Carson

Autobiography of Red, the first of Carson’s books to explore the classical Greek character of Geryon, was one of those reading experiences that change your perspective on what a writer can do with form. Both a novel and a poem, Carson took a lesser-known figure from myth, a red-winged monster, and transplants him and his story to a modern setting. Somehow simultaneously epic and quiet in scope, Geryon narrates his childhood, his relationships with his mother, his brother, and Herakles, an older boy who he becomes romantically entangled with. It’s a book to truly savour. The language is rich and immersive and I regularly recommend it.
Red Doc, published many years after, follows on from Autobiography of Red, with Carson changing the form and names to create something more concentrated and at times, inpenetrable. Regardless of the change-up in style, Carson is an absolute genius. Geryon, now ‘G’ is now an adult, travelling with his lover ‘Sad’ and Ida, an artist. It’s a testament to language, to emotion and to memory, and I’m so excited to pick up Carson’s other works soon.

- Olivia

Weyward by Emilia Hart

I am reading Weyward by Emilia Hart.

The story follows three women; Kate, in the present day, who has just escaped a toxic relationship to her late great aunts cottage in Cumbria, Violet, in 1942, who is struggling to fulfil her fathers expectations to be a ‘proper young lady’ and Altha, in 1619, who is on trial for witchcraft.
I like anything about the witch trials, and chapters that alternate between timelines/characters so this book sounded perfect when I picked it up. I’m enjoying how the story is unfolding and the women’s lives are entwining through history to the present day.

- Chloe